1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the area of computer-telephony-integrated (CTI) telephone systems including Internet Protocol Network Telephony (IPNT) systems, and pertains particularly to a system and methods for improving the performance of complex interaction routing in a communication center.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) is well known and established in the art of telephony. Contact centers that employ state-of-art communications technologies practice interaction routing according to well developed software routines typically referred to as routing strategies.
Merging of pure telephone systems and computer networks has led to an evolution of transformation languages some of which are well known standards in the public domain and some of which are known to and are accessible to the inventor. Communication center extensible markup language (CCXML), and Voice Extensible Markup Language (VXML) are well known examples of languages used in expressing routing strategy that include expression of basic call control functions.
The inventor is aware of other XML-based languages used for expressing and executing interaction routing strategies in state-of-art communications centers (CC) where a typical CC application may include interactive voice response (IVR) scripts, intelligent routing strategies, various call control scenarios, agent scripting, statistical reporting, interaction workflow processing, agent level routing, customer profile-related routing, outbound call support, and multimedia interactions. XStrategy (XST) is known to the inventor and contains existing XML-based constructs but is enhanced through addition of newer constructs developed for more complex interaction routing environments.
An XML document enhanced with XST constructs has a file extension .sxml and may generally be defined as an (SXML) document. XST is used to specify call treatments, priorities, waiting time, timeouts and many other interaction states, variables, conditions, and commands. XST can be implemented as an extension of simple media control protocol (SMCP) known to the inventors for communicating call models represented in XML primitives or other low level descriptor languages.
XST can be used with a simple object application protocol (SOAP) or Xpath transport mechanisms in conjunction with back end data services as well as with Web service defined by Web Service Description Language (WSDL) or Web Service Flow Language (WSFL). It can be integrated into workflow management languages like Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) and XML Process Definition Language (XPDL). By tagging the existing scripts with an XST start tag, a predefined routine may be executed.
A tool known to the inventor as an interactive routing designer (IRD) is used to graphically construct XML-based routing strategies that are transformed into a more abstract interaction routing language (IRL) also known to the inventor. Extensible Style sheet Language Transformation (XSLT) may be used to transform XST directly to an abstract IRL or a valid subset of IRD XML. Exemplary XST sample scripts can be viewed in a U.S. patent specification entitled “Method for Implementing and Executing Communication Center Routing Strategies Represented in Extensible Markup Language” Ser. No. 11/317,105 Filed: Dec. 22, 2005.
Routing of customer interactions to customer service representatives is a critically important function of every state-of-art contact center. Traditional interaction routing is executed within a CC router in accordance with a routing logic expressed as an executable strategy. The flow of a routing strategy may be shaped or influenced by exiting states and rules relative to customer data, type of service, operational situation of contact center, business information, etc.
More complicated strategies contain sophisticated routines for accessing data from databases and manipulating or processing the accessed data. A byproduct of more complicated and intelligent routines is an increased difficulty in design and implementation of such routines. Deployment and actual runtime execution of these more complicated routing strategies also presents problems and challenges. For example, a typical intelligent routing strategy may occupy hundreds of pages represented in a complicated spaghetti-like graphical form. These routines are extremely error prone and face enormous qualification requirements from developers.
The IRD tool mentioned further above enables creation of sophisticated routing strategies aided by a graphics user interface (GUI) and a graphics regime. The IRD tool contains utilities for working with databases containing application and business data. However, the richness of language capability of the tool pales in comparison to traditional application programming languages like C, C++, C#, Java, etc. C#, or C-Sharp is a more recent C-based object oriented programming language developed by Microsoft™. The complexity of current state-of-art routing strategies subjects the host router to processes that substantially deviate from pure routing functions that the router is designed to perform. Execution of complex business calculations by the router often results in system overloads and resulting performance glitches.
Therefore what is needed in the art is a system and methods for improving the performance of interaction routing within a communication center.